I enjoy this book. Interesting sci-fi concepts, some thrilling/horror filled moments as well as funny. Would it translate well to film? What do my fellow Trek BBS denizens think? Bring on the Moties!
Oh, DEFINITELY! Mote's one of my favorite SF books of all times and the concepts are so visually exciting! It's a natural!
It could make a good movie, but I think I might prefer Footfall as a movie, just to hear the gloriously cheesy line, "They have thumbs."
Footfall, another great one! I wanna see the little watchmaker Moties in a space suite holding a severed head trying to get off the ship! Frightening!
Footfall would make an excellent mini-series for one of the cable networks. It has the advantage of taking place (mostly) on Earth in the present-day which help keep a lot of the production costs down. So you could afford to do the aliens right.
The MacArthur being slowly destroyed would be very cool as well. The Motie planet would be interesting and weird. There should be a hard-sci-fi production studio for these books. They would be instant classics... as long as Michael Bay never set foot inside it!
I stepped inside this book on New Years Eve once. I thought it was because I was so drunk, but later, much later, I found out that I was so drunk that I didn't remember trying to score some acid... But after the Security thug hit me in the head, I sort of half came to for a minute as I'm screaming how they're trying to steal the secrets of the langstrom drive and the alderston field... The Security Guard, Three times my size and from the Pacific Islands, so you'd understand he might be touchy if I'm talking about his immigration status, I referred to as "three armed Alien Motie Scum" with incredible volume. If I had know that was an acid trip, I probably wouldn't have given up drinking.
The Mote in God's Eye would suffer from its witless notion that future man will somehow morph into cartoonish versions of British imperialists, Russian imperialists and an assortment of other cliches. Yet if the movie makers were intelligent enough to can that crap, people would hate them for betraying the "novel." As for the science fiction, yes, technically it is possible to get over the disappointment of finding out Malthus was wrong by imagining an SF universe where HE WAS RIGHT! Doesn't make it a good idea though.
I have loved "Mote" for years and have wanted a movie version since forever. In fact, I once gave my original copy of the book to a producer I met through my wife (at the time). He was looking for a good Sci-Fi story. Nothing ever came of it, unfortunately. I'm not the biggest Niven and Pournelle fan, but I LOVED Mote.